


Baby Girl

by ASentientSlug



Category: Evillious Chronicles
Genre: A story in which Gallerian does not have the Clockworker's Doll, Gen, Not so much of a story as a letter, Or a plea, my apologies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 20:24:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19708759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ASentientSlug/pseuds/ASentientSlug
Summary: In a world in which Gallerian Marlon never discovers the Clockworker's Doll, he struggles with the death of Michelle in his own ways.





	Baby Girl

How do you suppose he felt when he learned you were dead, baby girl?

Do you suppose he reacted immediately, decapitated at the knees by your grim reaper, the telegram containing the news falling from his fingers to be buried in the soft Leviantan snow (he puts flowers on the gravel path where the telegram rests, under the frozen and backbreaking Earth), or do you suppose he never noticed your passing until three months later when, just like every day for the past three months, you failed to run into that door of his study and it suddenly became too much for him? His jaw slackened; the telegram fell from his fingers and landed on the plush study carpet. He puts flowers on the carpet where it rests.

The whole house smells like flowers ever since the day you left it. He hasn’t seen roses since the day you died (they hurt too much to see) but he can smell them on the carpet and the gravel path and in the dark recesses of his mind where the telegram is still falling, burying itself in the murk.

He doesn’t remember if there was snow on the ground when you were buried in March. It was too dark to see the ground- the sun couldn’t illuminate the thick, rose-scented darkness- but nevertheless, he remembers the cold that rose up through the soles of his feet into his frigid fingers. The gravediggers grunted under their frosty breath as they worked to chop holes in the unyielding ground. He couldn’t do anything much but watch them, hopelessly numb, for his feet had frozen fast. After they laid you in the ground, they presented him with the shovel. He took it like a baby grabs on to something (and he was reminded of you grabbing onto his finger the day you were born) and stared at it, becoming a sudden speck of dust in a giant’s hand. He didn’t know what to do with it. The butler nudged him in the back, just a small and polite tap, to remind him to move. And he did. He held his own giant finger and spread the first clod of welded-shut earth over the welded-shut coffin of his baby girl. He picked up another clod mechanically and buried his daughter himself until they took the shovel from his unrelenting hands. He didn’t remember if he cried or not, but if he had, the tears would have dried into icicles down his entire body.

Icicles hang from the eaves now, even in summer. It is summer now with the wildflowers willfully sprouting themselves out of the fluffy green lawn, but every time he sees them, he is possessed by a feeling of utter wrongness, because you aren’t five years old and running through them anymore. You aren’t seven and picking a bouquet of grubby, caterpillar infested weeds to put in a fine crystal vase in the kitchen. You aren’t ten and wailing for help because your tongue is stuck to one of the year-round icicles that you tried to lick. It’s wrong, because he knows all three of you are somewhere in that yard, and perhaps he only has to creep up on you to see it. Sometimes he tiptoes to the door in the middle of the night, flings it open, and dashes outside to surprise you in your games that he can half-see from the window, from the corner of his eye. The butler brings him back in and puts him to bed when he can’t find you. It’s like that game of hide-and-go-seek when you were eight and you climbed so high into the big trauben tree that no one from the ground could see you. Sometimes he climbs that tree himself just to see if you’re still up there somehow, ready to jump out with a “Surprise!”

You gave him a teapot for his 30th birthday which integrated its way into the family home. The butler comes in and leaves it with a cup at the edge of his desk every day at 3:30 PM with a biscuit. The tea smells like roses now because all he can see are your two, small hands holding the edge of the teapot and presenting it to him.

Dimples. Baby girl, you had dimples, and the fact of this ruins him.

Do you suppose he is able to go a single day without thinking of you in some way? Even if the house you grew up in or the world you ran through with your smiles so bright (you had dimples, and it ruins him) don't remind him, you are imprinted in the very depths of his being. Inside of him is a large cut-out that is shaped like a telegram and made of a love so deep it stagnates him and pins him to the floor. 

Yesterday a defendant who had been found guilty in a previous trial had his death sentence carried out via guillotine. It occurred to him at that moment that your telegram (which he carries with him, faded and falling in his inner coat pocket) is a guillotine as well which follows him through life. It slices his face into sections marked by tear lines. It severs his heart from the arteries so they exist in a stasis, unable to connect, unable to do anything but pump repeatedly and futilely. He wishes he could reach out and connect them. He wishes he could hold your hand one last time.

In the back of your closet is the dress he picked out with your mother for your sixteenth birthday. It is the soft yellow of a rose in sunset and as delicate as the day it was first purchased. Your parents planned to hold a grand ball for you, inviting all of your friends, and he planned to have the first dance with you. You were growing so tall, but he wanted to hold his baby girl in his arms one last time so he could say goodbye to you and let you go off into the world of adulthood and college.

Maybe the reason he can’t move forward, steps rooted to the ground since your funeral, is because he never got to hold you and say goodbye.

On the nights he doesn’t run out on the lawn looking for you, he goes to your room and holds the dress, still wrapped in his arms like he held you when you were still an infant. Icicles melt from his eyes onto the coverings. They are stained with rose-smelling tears. The butler waits until his soft sobbing subsides into a series of inaudible sighs before he brings him back to bed.

As the butler hangs up your sweet sixteen dress back up in the closet, the tears run down its sides and drip onto the floor where they join their companions and become a stream, bubbling out of the closet, following familiar lines past the study, out the front door, and down the garden path. If he followed those lines, he would find you as you would be now, twenty years old.

Do you suppose at this time of night you’d be up still, with your hair in a bun and reading glasses on the end of your nose, studying for one final hour? Or perhaps you would be asleep with your hair, cut short and business-like, fanning over the pillow, as you dream of your first day at your new job tomorrow. Perhaps you are out laughing with friends, jumping about in ecstasy as you dance to loud music and drink such volumes of alcohol that you’ll be sick the next day. Perhaps you are holding hands with and staring into the eyes of your lover as he holds you and rocks you back and forth in his arms and whispers his love into your skin.

If only the man you called your Papa’s feet weren’t rooted to the ground, he would follow that river out into the world and watch you, the wonderful young lady that you are, burning as the brightest star in the sky. He would stand on the shore of his ocean of tears and raise you out of it with his own giant hands as if nothing ever happened.

As he writes this, a tear falls from his face and into his tea. It creates a sisterhood of small circles which fan out to the edge of the cup before subsiding with a series of inaudible sighs. They are quiet waves on this still ocean. Soon, the butler will come by to take the teapot you gave to the man you called your Papa as his 30th birthday present. Before too long, the butler will return to collect that man himself.

This is your 20th birthday present, baby girl, and if you were here to read it, you would laugh at him and call him an utter fool.

He wishes you would.

**Author's Note:**

> For the stars of my life


End file.
